WOTAN Vaporware?

So it is official. I haven't updated the blog in a couple weeks and I have decided to officially name Project WOTAN to WOTAN FOREVER (reference).

OK, not really, however I have had an interesting development lately in that I have become gainfully employed. I swore it wouldn't happen again, but who was I kidding? What this means, of course, is that my already-precious time just became even more precious and scarce. Which means that Project WOTAN will not launch this month as previously planned.

I am by no means giving up on it, however. But now we are looking at an ETA somewhat down the road. Perhaps December, perhaps January 2011, but I highly doubt it will be sooner. So I do not fault you, dear reader, if you consider WOTAN as vaporware. I probably would also if I were you.

But it is not! This past weekend even, I was hard at work on the continued refining of my template system. Like I have said continuously, Project WOTAN is very much a learning project for me and so I frequently go back and update the code to reflect new techniques I have learned or optimize newbishly-written methods.

No doubt, though, that on the whole WOTAN's codebase is still quite a newbish affair, however I hope to minimize that by adhering as strictly as possibly to the MVC pattern. I have to admit, though, that my other commitment to creating a highly-normalized database structure is leaving me a little befuddled when I find myself sorting through my fast-approaching-50-some tables.

I have no doubt, that WOTAN will also be better for the extension. Part of my recent effort to refine my template class and system has involved a lot of rewriting class methods to return arrays (rather than strings) in order to future-proof them for eventual use with JSON and thus AJAX.

So, yes, I hate to admit it, but I was not quite hitting my August release mark to begin with. And now with the advent of working a full-time job with a two-hour-each-way commute (I am a proud patron of Portland's public transit system), that is essentially guaranteeing I will not make my August deadline.

But I have already sworn an oath to finish this monstrosity, so you know it is going to happen eventually. Hopefully this year even!

Reevaluation

I have finally begun work once more on Project WOTAN. I am currently slogging away through the Administrative interfaces to the Item module, and I am almost "done." Of course, with the quotes ... when I say done, I am not factoring in the design work and requisite code debt. And then there is all the non-admin stuff -- the actual game.

I plan on beginning the Character module soon, therefore. But there is still a mountain of work to be done, and I am at least a week behind where I wanted to be. These sad truths have led me to reevaluate how I want to release WOTAN to world, further distilling my plans as WOTAN unfolds with the future.

First, I have to admit I feel a little down. I feel like I move really slowly, as if I should be much farther ahead than I am. WOTAN is, however, an educational enterprise for me. As I have mentioned before, little more than a year ago, my knowledge of SQL was non-existent and I could produce a http header redirect in PHP but not really know why. So WOTAN can be looked at as an almost-purely educational enterprise.

At any right, what I am driving at, is that while I still plan on reaching my first mile stone with WOTAN by August, I will be shifting gears somewhat and I will not be releasing "THE WIZARD'S TOWER" at that time.

As part of the whole learning process (I suppose) I realized that I have been doing and focusing on is more in lines with game development rather than game design. I suppose that might mean something substantive, but if not, what I am getting at is that rather than splitting my energy coming up with both a game engine and a game I would be better served investing all my time into the actual engine, and leave the game for farther down the road.

I plan instead, as I have mentioned in a previous post, to offer WOTAN to the public from a website dedicated solely to the engine. I still haven't decided on open-source versus proprietary licensing yet. I am leaning very strongly toward open sourcing WOTAN, however.

Looking beyond the Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf or Tunnels and Trolls aspects of the sort of game I would like to play on a WOTAN site, I realized that what I am creating is really only a very specialized type of content management system.

I am also trimming down a few of the planned features for the WOTAN engine. Movement-restriction will be left to the back-burner for a while. Game tokens, a.k.a. site RMT, have also been downgraded as a priority. Opponent NPCs are definitely still in, but if I have to make another cut, it will probably be Vendor NPCs. And this is not that these features won't make their way in eventually -- just not in August, or perhaps even before Christmas.

The first planned non-core module planned will be a Character Race module, which will be generic enough to double as a "class" module, or any other way the game master can think to express the concept. I want to do this one first because it will be relatively easy, and I plan to use its creation to document a "module how-to" guide. And for post-launch modules I plan on creating the aforementioned Site Token and Movement modules.

I think first, however, I will be exploring two modules to facilitate dynamic gameplay: a procedural "dungeon generator" and something I am still trying to wrap my mind around, but is based on the Mythic Game Master Emulator. The "dungeon generator" is not likely to be anything like what would be described if you were to google that term, and so while I am working on the other parts of the site I have been making a little side-project of conceptualizing. Like the latter mentioned GM emulator, I don't really have anything to say; expect to start hearing more in a month or two.

I believe I have found a great resource for artwork at DriveThruRPG. This eases my mind quite a bit, as the artwork is all really inexpensive and most of it has no licensing issues. So I plan on exploiting that resource a fair bit for illustration work.

That about covers where I am with all that. I having a raging hard-on for getting this project finished, however. Though the perpetual torpor of my malaise is like a constant weight around my neck. Oh well.